Does Much-Unloved Pinotage Deserve Another Look?

By

Lettie Teague

Updated Jan. 15, 2013 4:25 p.m. ET

THERE ARE VERY FEW wines I truly don't like, and only one that I've ever declared I despise. Except that wine writers are not supposed to "despise" wines. While we can be disappointed, or crestfallen, or even seriously dismayed by certain bottlings, to "despise" a wine is unprofessional—or so I was told by a reader who wrote recently to upbraid me after reading of my professed enmity toward Pinotage.

Never mind that this particular reader also happened to be a Pinotage grower—I decided that he might...